One of the things that makes the Montessori classroom unique is the idea that the environment is the teacher, and the child is to be trusted to work independently within the environment. The role of the Montessori educator, often referred to as a guide, is to observe the child, adjusting the environment and offering lessons and concepts in response to their observations and the child’s interests. This method requires a fair amount of faith from both the educator and the parents in the child’s ability to seek out what they need for their growth and brain development.
Maria Montessori observed that a child often seeks repetition with a work until mastery. Mastery, of course, is subjective, and may mean something different to the child than it does to the educator observing from the outside.
We cannot always know what the child is seeking through repetition, what skill their brain is honing, what question is being answered. It is, therefore, our job to trust both the child to lead themselves to the materials they need and the environment to support them.
One of the most beautiful examples of trusting the child occurred in our Primary class this winter. We have a second year Primary student in our class who has, with singular focus and attention, been honed in on our geometric tangrams for the past year and a half. For those unfamiliar, wooden tangrams are a collection of painted geometric shapes, and they can be used to create designs and patterns. Without fail this child has chosen the tangrams every single school day since he joined the Primary classroom. Quietly and determinedly, alone and with friends, he would build elaborate two and three dimensional designs with the tangrams, sometimes working with them for the duration of work cycle (3 hours).
As educators we love the tangrams because the child can use them to explore pattern, symmetry, geometric shapes, engineering, and design. Over time we observed the way that this child interacted with the tangrams evolve, becoming more sophisticated and orderly. As he got older and the order of the classroom was internalized he unconsciously became more organized with the work, keeping the tangrams on his mat, positioning his body on the floor next to the mat, taking care to build slowly and methodically. His designs also got more complex, from simple geometric patterns to designs that represented other things, like animals or mythical creatures. He began to story tell with the tangrams, creating elaborate scenes with many interconnected elements.
We tell parents that the introduction of various academics is sort of like throwing noodles at a wall. You continue to offer, and then eventually, when they’re ready, it sticks. Our goals is never to push a child beyond where they are ready to go independently for fear of fast tracking necessary skill development or creating resentment towards the material. Instead we continually offer, and sometimes nudge, but generally respect the child’s pace. This child, deep in their tangrams, was open to some gentle nudging. He enjoyed integrating a Moveable Alphabet into his tangram design, allowing him to phonetically label his creations and write out the stories in his imagination. He kept pace with his peers in his math and language works, but you could tell that he wasn’t particularly motivated to do anything but the tangrams.
Until one day, something flipped. He came in hungry for language. In a matter of two weeks he worked through half of our Waseca language cabinets, tearing through sound blends and phonograms with the same focus and voracity that he had previously only applied to tangrams. He will happily spend the entire three hour work cycle doing language works and then come back for more during our afternoon work period. He is proud, excited, and (most importantly) entirely self motivated. This leap forward in language has been entirely his own doing, something that could only be accomplished when he was ready.
It is easy to look at a child allowed to do tangrams every day for two years and not understand why we haven’t pushed them off into “serious” works. Instead, this child’s parents showed faith in the Montessori process, faith in the environment, and faith in their child. What we as educators recognized is that this child needed something from the tangrams, there was a skill he was building in the repetition that was integral to his development. So much of the Montessori Primary classroom is focused on building pre-reading and pre-math skills in a way that doesn’t seem like work to the child. They develop order, organization, coordination, and concentration, hand strength, motor skills, and dexterity, all through doing works that capture their attention and focus by being interesting and developmentally challenging. Once they’ve done the work of collecting and assembling all the various puzzle pieces they are able make a huge leap forward.
From the outside it can feel slow to watch them go through the process of gathering those necessary skills, and the adult’s inclination can be to rush them. Instead, we urge you to follow the child’s pace, trust that there is nothing in the environment that is not feeding them, and wait for the leap.